As the Sea
by Erinya
Summary: The Turners have an unexpected visitor. No real spoilers. OFC. Written for the prompt 'Will, daughter.'


**Disclaimer**: Not my sandbox. I just play here.  
**Summary**: The Turners have an unexpected visitor. Written for Shad, who long ago gave me the prompt "Will, daughter." More gen than anything else; all pairings come pre-wrecked. OFC.

* * *

**As the Sea**

In the lantern-light, the gleam of beads braided in tangled locks, a face shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat, a slim figure in a long pea-coat and trousers and high-topped boots: a sailor, who cocks an ironic eyebrow from under the jaunty hat-brim and says lightly,

"Thank goodness for that, Will Turner. I was beginning to fear that I'd got the wrong address."

There is a pause; finally, Will breathes, and says, "You."

"Yes," says the visitor. "Yes, it's me." A slight inclination of the head, a sly curve of the mouth. "You haven't slammed the door in my face yet, so that's something. Although you look very surprised."

He opens his mouth to answer, to say any number of things he might regret; but before he can his Jenny's clear, laughing voice rings out from the drawing room, and they both start a bit and turn as one, a thing that has not changed.

"Father? Who is at the door?"

Will says, "It's--" but the sailor reaches out and places a finger across his lips, the lightest of touches, and he cannot speak for a moment. "It's an old friend," he says finally; and curses himself, bitterly, for a fool.

"Will this friend be staying for supper?" inquires Jenny, ever practical, as she appears in the cottage's modest hall, smiling prettily at the both of them. His heart contracts, as it tends to lately, at how quickly she's becoming a woman, composed and beautiful, already the lady of the house.

"Yes." The visitor's expression has gone over quite queer indeed; the kohled dark eyes are fixed intently on the girl in the hall. "Yes, I think I will. If you'll have me," with a quick look in Will's direction. He sees a challenge there as well as a question, and a flicker of uncertainty.

"Of course," Will says, defeated. There are a very many other things to be said, but for now he merely stands aside; and the pirate grins at him in passing, a quick, sharp, brilliant smile that pierces his heart like steel. Calloused fingers brush across the back of his hand.

He snatches it away.

Jenny's glance between the two of them is keenly curious, but she says, brightly, "My father seems to have forgotten his manners, so I suppose I must beg you to excuse him, and introduce myself." She drops a curtsy. "Genevieve Turner. But most everyone calls me Jenny, and so may you."

"Thank you," says their guest, grave but for that small, secret smile. "A pleasure to meet you, Miss Jenny Turner," bowing slightly and offering a name in return that Will knows and does not know.

"I've heard of you, I think," says Jenny.

"You might have, at that." A drawl, another flick of those arresting eyes to Will. "I wonder if you've heard anything true."

"Maybe you can tell me," Jenny says, quite serious, and the look they share leaves Will out and uncomfortable, in the grip of some cold fear he can't quite define.

"Why are you here?" Will hisses, when Jenny has excused herself to tell Cook to set another place at table. "Why now? What are you playing at?"

"I wanted to see her," the pirate says, as if it's obvious, as if it's simple. "She is my daughter, you know."

"No," Will says, anger flaring. "She's _my_ daughter. She might as well not have a mother at all."

He sees the impact of his words in the slender figure's sudden stillness, the hard set of a jaw that he remembers well, proud and always a little too strong in profile.

"I knew you wouldn't understand," says the woman who had once been Elizabeth Turner; and she's right. He doesn't.

He says flatly, "I thought you might be dead."

She stirs, as if to touch him again; but she doesn't. "I _am_ sorry about that. You see, I thought it might be easier that way."

"_Easier_," he repeats, incredulous. "What could you possibly think was easy about it? Don't you mean it was easier for _you_?"

"For both of us."

"Well," Will says, with a kind of desperate calm, "it wasn't. If you were wondering."

"I know," quietly. "I was wrong. There was no easy way."

_No, but there was a_ right _way_, he thinks; and almost says it. Instead, he says, "Was it worth it?"

There is a long white scar across her cheek, he notices when she turns away: straight and fine, like the mark of a blade. "Some of it was," she says, and he wonders which parts, what makes her smile so, what other wounds have marked her, what has hardened her. "You seem to have done all right without me, anyway. She…Jenny…she seems happy."

"She is happy," Will says sharply. "_We_ are happy."

"I'm glad," she says, and for a second he knows her, and thinks she might just mean it.

* * *

"So you're a sailor," Genevieve says, with polite interest. They are seated around the small table in the kitchen for supper, the three of them, like a pantomime of might-have-beens. "I didn't know they let ladies sail ships." 

"Nobody _lets_ me," Elizabeth corrects her. "I'm no lady. I do what I want."

"But nobody stops you."

Another sharp smile, and a cut of kohled eyes towards Will. "I'd like to see them try."

Has her smile always been so dangerous? He can't remember. She's changed so much: her once-fair skin weathered and creased about her eyes and mouth, her tanned cheek marred by that rogue's scar; her body is lean and hard as any man's, and she moves like a man, too, with the easy, focused grace of a practiced fighter. And yet it's not enough. He can still glimpse the woman he loved in the turn and tilt of her golden head, behind the wary eyes, in the wide-legged swordsman's stance he taught her himself, so many years ago.

"How do you and Father know each other?" Genevieve asks.

A slight pause. "We grew up together," Elizabeth says finally.

"He never told me that."

"Your father," Elizabeth says, "does not approve of pirates."

Jenny says, round-eyed, "Are you really a pirate?"

"You've heard the stories," says Elizabeth, in arch tones. "What do you think?"

"Do you really know Jack Sparrow?" Jenny leans forward, her interest genuine now. Will frowns at her, but she doesn't seem to notice. He frowns at Elizabeth instead, who only quirks a wicked eyebrow at him.

"I do." She leans back in her chair. "But then, so does your father. Did."

Jenny turns to him, questioning. Will slumps a bit. "Er, yes. How is dear old Jack these days…Bess?" He bites the name off; it stings his tongue like rum, or sea-salt in a wound.

Elizabeth lifts her shoulders in a delicate shrug. "How should I know?"

"I thought you sailed with him," Jenny says.

"But I heard you took his name," Will says slowly. "I thought that's why…"

"You thought I _married_ him?" She throws back her head and laughs, another unfamiliar gesture; it shocks him, the coarseness of it, what she's become. "Jack's no marrying man. No more than I turned out to be a marrying woman," with heavy irony. "No, I took the name because it wasn't mine and as good as any. We parted ways years ago, when he went haring off after one of Ponce de León's silly fantasies."

"You mean the Fountain of Youth," Jenny says. "Did he find it?"

"I don't know," Elizabeth answers solemnly. "The stories say he looks the same as ever. Hasn't aged a day. Whether that's the truth…" She shrugs again. "Who can say? But I wouldn't be surprised."

Jenny stares. "Why didn't you go with him?"

"Because I'm not like Jack," she says. "Not that way. I never wanted to live forever." Elizabeth meets Will's eyes, speaking to him now, softly. "I only wanted to _live_."

* * *

"I try to help Father as much as I can, and keep the house for him," Jenny says. She and Elizabeth have lingered at the table, though the meal is long over and the dishes cleared away. "My mother went away when I was very small, and he has no one else to do it for him, you see." 

Elizabeth takes a sip of wine. The open bottle before her is almost empty, but she seems sober enough when she speaks. "That must have been hard for you."

"No," Jenny says, matter-of-fact. "I was too young to remember her."

"Of course," Elizabeth says, as if to herself. "It was the same for me, with my mother."

"I've always wondered why she left, though," Jenny says. "Father doesn't like to talk about her, so I never ask him."

There is a pause. Elizabeth's eyes are bright as she lifts a hand to brush a lock of dark hair from Jenny's forehead. "I think, perhaps," she says, "your mother was a very foolish woman, dear. And maybe she was afraid that she wouldn't make a very good mother at all."

"Maybe. I used to think," Jenny adds, in a small, thoughtful voice, "that she went away because of me. That maybe she didn't like me enough to stay."

"Oh, my dear." Elizabeth's indrawn breath might be an aborted laugh, if not for her expression. "You were wrong. Any woman would count herself lucky to have a child like you, sweet Jenny."

"You're very kind," Jenny says, blushing.

"No, I'm not." The sound she makes _is_ a laugh this time, if short and harsh. "Pirate, remember?"

"Not all pirates are cruel," Jenny says. "Father says some pirates are good men."

"Does he," Elizabeth says, with cool amusement.

"He meant women, too. Did you ever have any children?"

Will hadn't thought she'd seen him there, standing in the shadows outside the kitchen door, but Elizabeth's gaze shifts to his, at this, and holds it. She says, as if choosing her words carefully, "It's no life to raise a child in. Too hard. Too dangerous."

"I think," Jenny says, frankly, "that you would have made a good mother."

For one brief instant, Elizabeth sits very still. Then she rises abruptly, the scrape of her chair loud in the silence. "I must go," she says, her face in shadow, her voice sharpening where it had softened before. "The tide...and it's far too late. You should go to bed."

"You see?" Jenny says, and smiles, and rises as well. "I will go up, then, and bid you goodbye. I am glad to have met you, Madame Bess. May I kiss you? I would like to kiss you."

"You may," Elizabeth says; and when Jenny touches her lips to her scarred cheek, she hugs the girl tightly to her. "Goodbye, Genevieve," she whispers. "Remember what I told you."

"I'll remember," Jenny says, a promise, and lays her smooth cheek against her mother's weathered one. They step apart, and for a moment Will cannot breathe, they are so much alike.

"I'll show myself out," says Elizabeth. And a moment later she is gone. The door shuts quietly behind her. Will finds he didn't expect her to say goodbye to him, anyway; and perhaps the look she gave him as she turned away said enough. He steps forward into the light, putting a hand lightly on his daughter's shoulder; she stands motionless in the middle of the room, looking after Elizabeth thoughtfully.

"What did she tell you?" he asks her, feeling her exhale under his touch.

She shakes her head. "It's not important."

"It sounded important."

"Father…" She slips out of his grasp, busying her hands in brushing imaginary crumbs from the table. After a moment, she says, very quietly, "She offered to take me with her."

"She…_what_?"

"She said if I wanted to, she'd give me a place on her ship. Show me the world. She said…" Her expression turns inward, remembering. "She said that it was freedom, sailing I mean: traveling all the time, going wherever she wanted when she wanted to."

"And what did you say?" Will says, although he's not sure he wants to hear her answer.

"I said that it didn't sound like freedom so much as never coming home," Jenny says. And there's sadness in her voice, and something else, something too grown-up and knowing for her sixteen years. She lifts her head, the jut of her chin achingly familiar, as is the challenge in her direct gaze. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Jenny," and he's startled more now than he was to answer that door and see a strange woman standing before him in his wife's body. "You _knew_?"

"Of course I knew," she says. "I saw the way you looked at her. How she looked at you. I'm not a fool, Father, nor a child. Not anymore. And I've heard rumors; and other things as well."

The last words carry a weight of bitterness, and he hears in them all the painful taunts from which he's tried to shield her. "I'm sorry, Genevieve," he says, although it is not his apology to make. "I didn't want—"

"Were you ashamed of her? Or…were you afraid?" Jenny's eyes spark, burning brighter than the candles in that room, and hotter, too; they sear his soul. "Afraid I might become like her? Is that it?"

"No," Will says. "I think I was afraid I might lose you." He sinks onto a chair, passes a hand across his face. "Like I lost her. But I would have told you. It's she who asked me not to say a word."

"But _why_?"

He can't do this, he thinks; he doesn't have the energy, not now, not to face down both of them in one night. But there's no one else to do it for him, and he should be used to that. "She said she didn't want to make things complicated," he says, heavily. "She said we seemed happy, and she didn't want to ruin that for us. For you."

Jenny's laugh is like a sob. "Too late," she whispers, and he sees the tears streak down.

"I know," he says, "my Jenny, I _know_," and when he pulls her close she doesn't resist, only buries her head in his shoulder like the little girl she still mostly is. "She doesn't mean to," he tells her. "They call her Hurricane Bess for a reason, you know. It's in her nature. She can no more help it than the wind or waves."

"You still love her," Jenny says, with muffled disbelief. "How can you? After what she did to you? I don't. I won't. I _can't_," she says fiercely.

"You don't have to," he says. "But I do." He takes her shoulders, gently pushes her away from him. "Look at me, Jenny. I do still love her—because she gave me _you_."

"Am I—I'm not very like her, am I?"

Only so very much, he thinks, only enough to break his heart, only enough to be all his joy in the world. "Only the best of her," he says; and waits to see her smile.


End file.
